Fat Girl is the critical voice inside us all. Fat Girl speaks up when she feels vulnerable. When she is sad, rejected and when Fat Girl feels needy. She comes and goes, she isn’t always around. In fact, when life feels dandy weeks and months can go by without hearing from her. But when Fat Girl is around, you’ll know about it! Fat Girl is the anxious part of ourselves who self-doubts. Looking to friendships, relationships, careers she uses her voice when she needs external sources to validate her.

Fat Girl is simply a person, with feelings. Sometimes, like us all, she feels empowered, she is confident. She believes in herself and knows she is doing the right thing. But, occasionally Fat Girl struggles. She feels afraid, sad and anxious. Sometimes it keeps up at night. She writes a new plan which involves more gym and less carbs. But the truth is that Fat Girl is really craving nourishment through love, acceptance, warmth, security and stability. Fat Girl represents our emotional state. She is our emotional turmoil, our psychological issues, self-destructive habits, judgements and harsh inner critics.

Notably, her appetite is well beyond food. In fact, no amount of food is going to fill her up. Likewise, a clean diet of green juice and quinoa isn’t going to stop her feeling the way she does. Fat Girl’s issues aren’t really about being fat or thin, healthy or toned. Size and bodily composition aren't at the route of her issues. Fat Girl is far more than just her physical being.

Below is the SCOFF questionnaire GP's use to "clarify suspicion" of an eating disorder. A score of 2 or more positive answers is a positive screen. Have a go at the test, I think it's quite shocking how ordinary these questions are, particularly question 3 and 5. I know a lot of girls and women who would answer positively to those questions. This is just some food for thought - at how normalised our disordered eating issues are. I hope we can all work together and use Fat Girl as a space to destruct these anxieties, changing the conversation and raising greater awareness for these mental health issues.

SCOFF TEST*

Do you ever make yourself Sick because you feel uncomfortably full?

Do you worry you have lost Control over how much you eat?

Have you recently lost more than One stone in a three month period?

Do you believe yourself to be Fat when others say you are too thin?

Would you say that Food dominates your life?

Two more questions have been added for possible Bulimia assessment.

Are you satisfied with your eating patterns?

Do you ever eat in secret?

*Please note Fat Girl is only here for knowledge and support, if you think you need help with eating disorder issues, please visit BEAT, an eating disorder charity with medical experts

THE CRIMINALISATION OF FAT

Although a relatively confident girl, I spent most of my adolescence terrified of fat. Getting fat, feeling fat, being fat, it was the benchmark by which I determined my self-worth. Fat was ugly, shameful, uncomfortable, taboo and as a teen girl growing up in London, quite frankly, I was not supposed to be fat. I was supposed to be petite and soft, svelte and pretty, and these aren’t associated with fatness. It was only when my therapist gave me Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue that I really began to explore how charged the word is. The rhetoric used around fat perpetuates a destructive diet culture, encouraging eating disorders, body image issues and self-loathing, most significantly among young women. I’ve realised fat actually has very little to do with size. I believe on a micro level fat is a felt state of being, attached to the experiencing of negative emotions. On a macro level fat is criminal, society has not only made us afraid of the substance but damns those who carry too much of it or in the wrong places.

The reality was that I was never actually fat, never overweight, never obese. I had a little pre-pubescent puppy fat but my size was never medically threatening to my life. Nevertheless an obsessive fear of fat led me to spend the time until my early twenties constantly dieting, determined to stay in control of my body size and composition. I withdrew socially, and was addicted to anxiety-inducing thoughts about what I’d eaten and how it would effect my body. Beginning therapy made me question the why in these seemingly irrational behaviours. Why become so self-destructive? Why fight against my body? Why push myself so hard? Why become obsessive and addicted? Why so afraid of fat? I began therapy when I started my degree in social anthropology. Three years later I had some answers, drawing my conclusions from psychoanalysis, political theory and economics.

It was simply a matter of control, I was told. My life experiences felt uncertain and messy, I was out of control, desperate to create some order. As normal, my therapist and I began with my childhood. We worked through family life, exploring my relationship to food, my body and my parents. At university, I was learning about capitalism, the performativity of the body, the distinction between sex and gender. As I deconstructed both personal and cultural relationships to fat I realised it was an expression of self which we experience like currency. The loss and gain of body weight determining self-worth, the purity of diet - detox and clean eating - deciding our social status. Fat is political, sometimes so powerful it can govern over us. While I’ve worked hard to overcome my eating and body image issues, now feeling comfortable in my skin, I believe my fear of fat will remain for as long as society is afraid of it.

I don’t know a single girl who doesn’t worry about her body shape, hasn’t at some point in her life felt the need to diet or used the term “fat” as a negative. It makes sense because in a culture allergic to unhealthiness and largeness, no one wants to be the fat girl. It troubles me that those of us who struggle, struggle in private. As with most mental illness, shame plays a fundamental role in establishing the negative self-image and destructive behaviours rife in eating disorders. Attempting to deconstruct the myths around our relationship to fat, bodies and dieting, I am beginning an online platform aiming to be provide a safe and nourishing space for us to talk openly and honestly about our anxieties. Fat Girl is for all body shapes, colours and sizes hoping that we can find clarity in the sharing of our more vulnerable experiences and empower us all to own our bodies.

Fat Girl began because there is a need for girls to speak up about their often obscene and obsessive relationships with food and bodies. It feels as though diet culture and body judgement has become so normal that we no longer question our distorted and weird, often very painful and destructive, relationships to our physical selves.

Fat Girl is a open space for anyone to explore their body anxieties and emotional struggles. We believe the word "fat" is often metaphoric of our emotional experiences or an expression of our feelings. That is to say, I am hoping by sharing our bodily anxieties we may be able to free ourselves from the shackles of societies beauty ideals, and be able to nourish our emotional selves.

If you would like to share your story please email clementine@fatiseveryonesissue.com